Category: Reviews

I remember playing Oregon Trail in the library of my middle school back in the day. Even with the best planning, hunting, and river rafting skills, you died often enough on your journey that the ability to leave witty messages on your tombstone for a future passerby to read became a regular ritual.

Bandits stealing all your supplies and dying of dysentery became part of the expedition. Luck played in almost as much as skill, but we kept playing, again and again, determined to get a bit further this time and, eventually, make it all the way to Oregon.

Death Road To Canada Review

Death Road to Canada, a rogue-like title set during the zombie apocalypse, takes a lot of the simple concepts from earlier adventure titles such as Oregon Trail and sets you on a fun, addictive, and often hilarious journey. Like that childhood trip to Oregon long ago, death comes often in this game, but you will almost instantly find yourself ready to get back on the road.

Your goal in Death Road to Canada is clear and likely self-explanatory. You must guide a ragtag group of survivors to Canada, the only allegedly safe place after the world has been ravaged by the ravenous undead. Everything you have you must scavenge from locations you visit along the way. Food, medical supplies, gasoline, weapons, and any other items you need must be obtained at the risk of life and limb. And, as if fending off hordes of the undead wasn’t difficult enough, you also have to keep up morale.

The Caretaker

Along with ensuring everyone is fed and rested, you must also keep characters happy and loyal and, obviously, keep them from getting murdered. The events in the game are randomized, so you don’t always know how your choices will turn out. Sometimes, your choices appear fairly straightforward.

We chose not to accept an overnight invitation from a creepy-looking caretaker (and, yes, the game explicitly told us the caretaker was incredibly creepy). Of course, perhaps we shouldn’t judge by appearances, but as we have learned from TV shows like The Walking Dead, trust doesn’t come easy and is rarely rewarded during the zombie apocalypse.

Other times, choices seem more capricious. Once, I had a character shoot a deer that was standing in front of our car, blocking our path. One of my other members became angry I hadn’t chosen him instead, thus dropping his morale. After losing our car later due to an unfortunate encounter with a man wearing heavy body armour standing in the road, this member’s morale dropped so low he became despondent and wandered off into the woods to an unknown fate.

Oh, and I also learned not to tell bandits to “Cool it.” They don’t appreciate it and can become surprisingly violent as one of my former teammates tragically discovered. On second thought, perhaps that really isn’t so surprising.

Zombie Forecast

What you do have more control over during the game is how you handle your inventory. Weapons range from rifles and shotguns to blunt weapons such as wrenches, hammers, and even femurs. There are also less common weapons such as grenades, and you might even get the chance to buy a turret.

You can easily swap weapons between team members during missions by pulling up the menu, as long as you are within range of that teammate. Some characters can hold more weapons than others, but most can hold three. You are able to drop weapons if you find one during the scavenging event you would like to keep, rather than one you came with. You can also easily switch between the weapons you are carrying during a battle with the press of a single button.

There is no crafting in Death Road to Canada, so weapon management is simply a matter of distributing weapons thoughtfully, and only keeping the ones you think you will need. You have a total of 14 slots that can be used for storing weapons not currently being carried by characters. Before each mission, you can select which weapons you would like to take. Things like medical supplies are used automatically by team members after certain events and do not need to be managed.

In fact, one of the best aspects of the game is how it keeps it simple while offering just the right amount of customization. For example, each character comes with a certain set of skills and attributes which includes things like Medical, Shooting, Strength, and Mechanical ability. It might also include personality traits like a low morale, or low loyalty.

Boosting Characters

In the regular game mode where you will encounter random characters, you can increase some of their skills and attributes through certain activities or choices. For instance, you may get the opportunity to take shooting lessons, thus increasing everyone’s shooting skill. Or, you might have a certain character tinker overnight while at a rest stop, increasing their mechanical skill.

You also have the option of building your own custom characters. Each character comes with a certain set of traits. Traits can both positively and negatively affect skill sets and attributes. For instance, the “Inventive” trait will add two points to your mechanical skill, which might help you fix your car eventually if it breaks down.

I say eventually because on the negative side it might take a little practice. Sometimes the negative effects are comical. The “Nurturing” trait says it adds two points to your medical skill and gives you a great attitude. On the negative side, your positivity “may be an act.” For the risk taker, you can choose more extreme traits like “BESERK!” This boosts the character’s strength, fitness, and shooting ability by four points, but they can also be killed in one bite.

Being Surrounded On All Sides

You earn Zombo Points throughout the game that can be traded for perks. For instance, “Phoenix” resurrects a character upon death to full health, though it can also be used once per game. There are also more bizarre perks such as “Anime Fan”, which gives the player an overpowered Katana that cannot be dropped upon death. Just what every anime fan needs.

Combat is super simple, but fun. Cracking zombie skulls never seems to get old, and the splat they make when defeated is always satisfying. Using guns is also super simple and doesn’t require careful aiming, only that you are facing in the right direction.

But, be careful. Don’t be too overzealous with your zombie slaying. Your weapons break, and bullets, though not particularly scarce, are valuable, particularly when you find yourself in a siege event. What is a siege event, you ask? Only your worst nightmare, if your worst nightmare involves being surrounded on all sides by zombies.

There are five different game options available aside from the regular mode. Familiar Characters mode increases your chances of running into your custom characters. Rare Characters Mode increases your chances of coming across special characters, some with incredibly useful abilities, and some that look a lot like well-known characters such as Link from the Legend of Zelda series.

Deadlier Road Mode makes the game, well, more deadly than usual. The two remaining options either significantly shorten or elongate your road trip.

Best of all, the game never takes itself too seriously. The music, a 16-bit style techno and rock mix, is exhilarating and sometimes even quite catchy.

Quirky And Weird

The characters themselves are quirky and weird. My first character was using his time at the end of humanity to write a comic book about his life. I also ran across a man in a horse mask who, for all intents and purposes, considered himself an actual horse. I found him running along the highway, perhaps trying to locate his four-legged compadres, before my team forcibly pulled him into the car and made him join us.

Then, we all went to Y’all-Mart (you read that correctly). While at Y’all-Mart, I located a treadmill I had the horseman use despite the game’s warning against using a treadmill while surrounded by zombies. It all turned out for the best, however, as using the treadmill increased the horse man’s strength. Which was all well and good until I died some ten minutes later in a blaze of glory, mobbed by ravenous corpses. And, thus, the cycle began anew. The circle of life.

Swim Out is a turn-based puzzle game designed to be mentally stimulating while also relaxing the nerves and refreshing the soul. You can backstroke your way through a few levels to unwind after a stressful day at work, or perhaps enjoy a dog paddle after some guided meditation without harshing your mellow.

Swim Out Review PC

The game offers new players almost no tutorial. All you get are a couple of arrows to guide you to the exit. New elements are introduced one at a time, steadily increasing the complexity of the puzzles over time. The team at Lozange Lab does a nice job of making the elements feel intuitive, with their visual design complementing how they interact with the board.

Getting to the other end of the pool requires thinking a couple of moves ahead. You’ll need to first learn the pattern of behaviour for each different element in the pool. You will encounter different varieties of swimmer, ranging from elegant divers to kids doing cannonballs. Then you have to negotiate around the many types of environmental hazards, such as snippy little crabs or big waves that will delay you (or other swimmers) for a turn. Some puzzles include items that you will need to solve the puzzle, such as beach balls that can be used to stun nearby swimmers.

Relaxation is the guiding principle for the entire game. There is no timer. There is no move count and no “world average” like many other turn-based puzzle games. The game tracks your progress of which levels you’ve completed and gives bonus objectives on select levels, but there is no traditional score.

Handcrafted With Love

When you make a mistake, like running into another swimmer, the lifeguard will blow a whistle. It’s a sharp sound that could pull you out of the relaxed state. This is a minor quibble, but the sound might make some players hesitant to try out new strategies (or mute their audio).

Some of the puzzles are challenging and you might find yourself getting stuck. One of the nice features that Lozange Lab included was to unlock every level from the start. So, if you find yourself starting to feel frustrated, just skip back to the menu and try a different puzzle. That is a rare choice that fits nicely with the entire design ethos.

Swim Out’s gentle nature means that it might not be addictive in the traditional sense. The game doesn’t put you on a treadmill of accomplishments where there’s always some quest left unfinished. While that might be a downside for some people, this choice is another element in a cohesive design.

Nitchigamer is pleased to welcome Chris Kaminski to the team. Chris is a former video game producer, most notably for MadWorld and Valkyria Chronicles from his time at SEGA. These days he’s producing film and TV. Over to you, Chris:

Shadow Bug is a stylish puzzle platformer for the Nintendo Switch. The game provides moments of surprise and delight as you explore each of the three-dozen atmospheric levels. Muro Studios delivers a compact and entertaining experience that stands apart in a crowded scene of indie platform games.

Shadow Bug Review [Nintendo Switch]

You play as a miniscule ninja that is fighting against an invading horde of gnashing piranhas, angry robots, and other sinister creatures. The goal is quite simple: Get to the end of the level, as quickly as possible, while collecting as many white orbs as you can. You will be rewarded with up to three ninja stars per level. One for completing the level. A second star can be earned for finishing under the par time. And a third star for collecting more than the benchmark of orbs, which can be found strewn about the level and are earned by defeating enemies as well.

Shadow Bug takes a refreshingly minimalist approach. There’s no story for this game. As a matter of fact, there is very little text at all. You’ll get a few instructions on the basic controls and some level names. That’s it.

The gameplay is easy to learn and yet it takes practice to master. Failure rarely feels punishing, which encourages experimentation and leads you gently down a path of discovery. This is an excellent combination of traits for a game that relies heavily on solving puzzles.

One of the uncommon design choices that Muro Studios made was to forego the traditional jump mechanic. There is no button to jump. Instead you can leap across great distances by attacking an enemy. The game was originally designed for touchscreen devices like phones and tablets, which lack controllers and buttons. The limited input makes traditional platform games challenging. Clever designers can use these limitations to create new experiences, which is exactly what happened with Shadow Bug.

Shadow Bug features a new control scheme that is unique to the Switch. You can use the left joystick to move the tiny ninja left and right, and the right stick’s motion controls to move a glowing firefly to indicate where to attack. While it might sound a bit confusing, the controls feel completely intuitive in practice. This control scheme often feels more precise and less-error-prone than touching the screen. You can still use the original touchscreen controls on the Switch if that is your preference.

The level design provides an array of different puzzle types. Sometimes you need to wander off the main path to find a key to unlock a door. Other times you’re timing your attack to avoid dangerous obstacles like lasers or spikes or globs of venom. Many of the levels contain delightful little visual surprises for figuring out something new.

Some levels involve fighting boss monsters. Many of these battles are reminiscent of Zelda games, where you have to figure out the weakness and then repeat that attack three times to kill them. This kind of mechanic feels perfectly suited to a puzzle-based platformer. It adds a welcome bit of variety and challenge to the game.

Shadow Bug also does a nice job of providing hidden areas, secrets caches of orbs, and bonus collectables. That combined with the three-throwing-star rating system provides a reason to play through the game additional times for those who want to achieve 100% completion or compete in speed runs.

The levels are short, so you can easily play for a few minutes and feel like you’ve made progress towards completion. This is the perfect feature for a game that originated on a mobile platform. It’s also for people who have busy lives and find it challenging to sit down to play for a couple hours at a time.

From Pitfall and Super Mario Brothers to Kid Icarus and Crash Bandicoot, the platformer has been challenging players for over thirty years. I feel the genre reached its peak in the late 90s when the PlayStation took the world by storm. Soon thereafter, games started to get exponentially larger and more complicated with hardware increasing in power with each successive generation. Gamers started to gravitate towards more hack-and-slash and open world titles like Devil May Cry or GTA.

In today’s gaming universe, nostalgia is having a direct effect on developers who grew up in the 80s and 90s and are looking towards the beloved games of their past. With the proliferation of Steam and the monster success of the Nintendo Switch, the platformer is making a massive comeback in the most glorious way possible. Indie developers finally have their time to shine, with WayForward’s Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse proving that old school platforming is healthier than ever.

Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse Review Nintendo Switch

This is the third adventure to feature everyone’s favourite hair whipping genie, where Shantae has lost her magic powers just as a great evil takes over her home of Sequin Land. Shantae must join forces with her arch nemesis, the pirate Risky Boots in order to vanquish the evil. As she struggles without her powers, Shantae must learn the pirate way and gain new weapons to take on her enemies.

Let me preface the rest of this review by mentioning that I have never played any of the other games in the series. They all look great, but I won’t be able to make any comparisons between them. If you enjoy this game, I suggest playing the other titles for some more platforming fun.

In this latest instalment, Shantae starts off with only the ability to whip her hair (her main weapon) and jump. Don’t let her innocent look fool you, that hair of hers is a deadly weapon and can vanquish her enemies with ease. As Shantae explores the islands around her home, she collects new weapons and upgrades which aid in the fight and also help her solve various puzzles located throughout. At the start of the adventure, you’ll notice hard to reach switches that you can’t seem to hit. It’s not until Shantae reaches the second island that you receive the flintlock pistol, which allows her to shoot through the narrow openings, activating the switches. The puzzles aren’t a great challenge, but they’re fun in their own right. You can also upgrade Shantae’s hair whip to make it stronger and more effective.

Just as the puzzles aren’t anything to write home about, the varying enemies could have been a little more ‘varied’. Each island has its own monsters to fight, but in reality, they all feel (mostly) the same, just with different skins. One island will have goblins, another has evil mermaids, and yet another will be populated with the walking dead, (not that one, sigh). The visuals are nice, yes, but they’re all defeated in the same way. I would have liked to see a little more variation in the baddies, instead of what seemed like the same sprites with new outfits.

The world that WayForward created is full of unique and colourful characters though, each beautifully animated throughout the adventure. I found the interactions between Shantae and the population tended to go on a little too long, but it all serves as exposition and backstory necessary to help move the story forward. It wasn’t so bad the first time around, but if you die and have to have the same interaction again, you’ll be glad there’s a skip button to race through the conversation.

The platforming in the game reminds me of a cross between Aladdin on the Genesis and any of the Mega Man games from the NES days. It’s not going to set any standards, but you’ll have a pretty fun time throughout the experience. Aside from vanquishing monsters, Shantae can also collect gems to buy health, weapons, and power-ups, and in a Zelda-like manner, find lost Heart Squibs which allow you to increase your heart containers/health meter.

As a fan of the platforming genre, I highly enjoyed Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse to the point that I would definitely seek out the other titles in the series. The game won’t win any awards on difficulty, but the story is funny, the characters well developed, and there’s a high fun factor in general.

Science and the spiritual realm are often considered opposites within our modern cultural milieu. So, what happens when the two clash together as very real yet polar counterparts? More specifically, what happens when the realms of madness come into contact with the methodical clockwork of the scientific method? Tesla vs. Lovecraft poses one answer to this: absolute and glorious chaos.

Tesla VS Lovecraft Review

We recently did a full review of Tesla vs. Lovecraft for the PC, but as a bit of a refresher, the game centres on an ominous interaction between famous horror author H. P. Lovecraft and well-known electric guru Nikola Tesla. After ignoring Lovecraft’s pleas not to continue with his work on electricity, Tesla finds his laboratory raided by minions of the sinister Cthulhu. Tesla must now take back his inventions and castigate the forces of darkness using his scientific knowledge, and enough firepower to take out any collection of onerous elder gods.

The battle has finally made its way onto the Nintendo Switch and thankfully none of the monster exploding mayhem has been lost in the transition. The neon blue of Tesla’s teleportation ability, the brilliant green of underworld portals, and the bright purple tones of a devastating blast translates just as well whether on full screen or in tablet mode. The monstrous hordes are just as crisp and clear on my TV as they are on the small tablet screen aside from the obvious reduction in size. At no point did I feel at a disadvantage using the tablet over the TV mode.

In fact, I actually preferred using the tablet over playing in TV mode despite the smaller screen and decreased speaker output. I used a pro-controller to play on my TV and felt the larger screen combined with the more fluid, slightly raised analogue sticks made the movement feel less precise. The slighter, tighter movement of the Joy-Con controls matched with the smaller screen felt far more precise and made the action flow more fluidly for me. Of course, this will be a matter of preference and hand size, but I do think the game feels more natural on the tablet.

Plus, the visuals will still feel crisp and clear and the audio on the tablet, though not a match for TV speakers, handles the techno jive and bass output of the soundtrack quite well.

The Switch version brings with it all of the quick gun action and screen-filling hordes that keep the pace pumping along at breakneck speeds. You will find numerous weapons of varying effectiveness lying about and will quickly learn which is best for dispatching enemies in the swiftest and most visceral fashion. Tesla can also collect certain perks that can be added at the start of each level. You will also acquire a mech that will increase Tesla’s firepower and shield for a few seconds before exploding. You can then begin collecting the parts from around the level in order to regain the power of the mech for a few seconds before the cycle begins again.

Tesla can momentarily escape being consumed by the throngs by using a teleportation ability. This becomes extremely useful and often keeps you from feeling overwhelmed. But, be careful. It does take some seconds to recharge after a few uses. Once you get the hang of the dual-stick combat, you will find yourself dancing around and through the monstrous masses like some badass ballerina equipped with weapons that would make the Terminator jealous.

Hollow. As if some cosmic justice, some divine destiny or simply just bloody good luck, that’s exactly the game I’m going to review today. Finally, I get to review a game I want to play, something I was looking forward to…

Hollow Review [Nintendo Switch]

Hollow is a first-person survival horror game by Forever Entertainment. The game has you play as a male pilot waking up in a capsule pod boarding Shakhter-One: a mining space station that gathers resources from Jupiter. Boarding Shakhter-One and playing as another amnesiac, all you know from an emergency warning is that the power generators are down and that there are no living people aboard. It’s your job to regain power to the space station and find out what has happened on Shakhter-One.

As soon as the game loaded up with a warning ‘This game contains scenes of violence and gore’, a smile appeared on mine and any survival horror fan’s face. A lot of this game does seem to cater to a certain gamer of a certain generation, the golden age of survival horror games. As you move around, your character is clunky and slow, and even with the fastest movement toggled, your character doesn’t move that fast at all. Like the games of past, this isn’t an action fest either, it’s slow-paced and infrequent.

As you start to play the game, you begin to release it’s just as much of a corridor shooter with the puzzle elements of a survival horror game mixed in; the game does what all great survival horror games do, feed you enough ammo to deal with most situations, but it makes ammo rare, not easily accessible – if you are a crack shot you can drop enemies with a single bullet.

Hollow adds a new mechanic I’ve not seen before, which is when you reload, you remove the clip with the ammo remaining within that clip; essentially throwing away bullets, it’s a great feature to have in a survival horror game as it adds more tension and more of a thought process to the genre.

Hollow has you typically finding notes and reading files to get a deeper understanding of what has happened aboard Shakhter-One; you’ll find keycodes, but unlike other games, this one expects you to remember those codes. There are also collectables in the form of files and radios that play rather disturbing audio clips: ‘Rip his skin off’. Regarding enemies, there isn’t much variety as there are only 3 types. And there’s a lot of this around the ship:

Hollow is a dark game, a very dark game. I am squinting most of the time playing it. Not to mention that your flashlight can sometimes hinder your view further as the light bounces off surfaces. It really makes you think of the best times to use it and the darkness makes you cautious, giving the game a claustrophobic feeling.

For an indie game, the environments are impressive, they feel lived in, it feels like Shakhter-One is a real space station, even with the reused assets. You’ll sometimes come across bodies hung up by chains with intestines laying around, it’s very ’90s.

Hollow has some great moments too, one in which all the power drops out and all the ambient sounds just stop… oh pants. I laughed right near the end as well, it’s one of the messages, I won’t ruin it, but good work Forever Games!

There are a few glitches and irks, unfortunately, especially with the textures going a bit crazy. I’m also not a fan of when you die, it takes you back to the main menu, making you sit through a large number of load screens. Necessary? The game isn’t great at signposting either, I missed the first gun in the game simply because I didn’t see it. It’s that dark. Lastly, the writing and voice acting, in short, are terrible, but, to be fair, it’s survival horror from yesteryear.